Maine has more than fifteen hundred lakes, scattered everywhere
through its extensive forests. Seventeen miles northwest of Portland
is Sebago Lake, one of the most attractive, an islet-dotted expanse,
fourteen miles long and ten miles wide, its Indian name meaning "the
stretch of water." Into it flows the rapid and devious Songo River,
discharging Long Lake, a little over two miles distant, but the boat
journey on the river to that lake is for six miles and around
twenty-seven bends. Thirty-eight miles northwest of Portland is Poland
Springs, the chief inland watering-place of Maine, with pure air, the
finest waters and large hotels. To the northward the Androscoggin
River, flowing from the flanks of the White Mountains, sweeps
eastwardly across the State, and then turns southward to unite its
current with the Kennebec in Merry Meeting Bay. Not far from the New
Hampshire boundary it pours down the Rumford Falls, one of the finest
of cataracts, the river making three or four leaps over ragged,
granite ledges, aggregating one hundred and sixty feet descent, the
final fall being nearly seventy feet, making a great roaring, heard
for a long distance. Here is a town of textile and paper-mills, with
three thousand people. Having turned to the southward, the river comes
to the Livermore Falls, another manufacturing village on the Indian
domain of Rockomeka, or the "great corn land." Here were born the
famous brothers Israel, Elihu B. and Cadwalader C. Washburne, who were
so long in the public service, representing Maine, Illinois and
Wisconsin. A handsome Gothic public library built of granite has been
erected as their memorial. Farther along is Leeds, the birthplace of
General Oliver O. Howard, and then some distance below the river
plunges down the Lewiston Falls of fifty-two feet at the second city
in Maine, the towns of Auburn and Lewiston having twenty-five thousand
population, chiefly employed in the manufacture of textiles, there
being large numbers of French Canadians in the mills. Bates College,
with two hundred students, is one of the chief buildings of Lewiston.
Eastward from Casco Bay to the Androscoggin is a rough wooded country
becoming, however, rather more level as the river is approached. The
Androscoggin having come down from the north, sweeps around to the
northeast to enter Merry Meeting Bay, and at the bend, about thirty
miles from Portland, is Brunswick, at the head of tidewater, with over
six thousand population, largely employed in its mills. The river
falls forty-one feet here in three separate cataracts, giving an
enormous water-power. This was the Indian Pejepscot, where the English
built Fort George in 1715, known as "the key of Western Maine." The
city is chiefly noted now as the seat of Bowdoin College, the chief
educational institution of Maine, incorporated in 1794, and opened in
1802 with an endowment by the State. It has nearly four hundred
students and attractive buildings, the most conspicuous one being
surmounted by twin spires, which are seen from afar in approaching the
town, rising above the trees with a thick growth of pines behind them.
This college had President Franklin Pierce, Hawthorne, Longfellow and
Chief Justice Fuller among its graduates, and Longfellow was its
professor of modern languages until 1835, when he was called to
Harvard. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ in Brunswick
in 1851-2, when her husband was in the Bowdoin College faculty. Pierre
Baudouin, a Huguenot refugee from La Rochelle, came to Portland in
1687; and his grandson, who was Governor of Massachusetts in 1785-6,
had his name given the college, the great-grandson, James Bowdoin 2nd,
the noted diplomatist, having been most liberal in his gifts to it.
Beyond Brunswick the Androscoggin broadens into Merry Meeting Bay,
which is finally absorbed by the Kennebec.